


One More to Carry

by cyprith



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-12
Updated: 2019-01-02
Packaged: 2019-09-17 01:44:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16965348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyprith/pseuds/cyprith
Summary: Cayde-6 may be dead, but at his core Cayde-6 is a machine. Machines can be repaired.





	1. How's My Hair

On her knees beside Cayde, her face pale in the failing light of his diodes, Rake summons her ghost.

"I'm sorry," he says even as Cayde lies there shuddering, coughing on his pain and still alive. He's _still alive—_ fading fast, yes, but for the moment _still_ _alive._

And they could help him. She's sure a little light could fix him—it has never failed to do otherwise. At the very least, they could use it to ease his pain. But her traitor ghost only shakes from side to side and backs away."There's nothing I can do."

Rake trembles, fire in every vein.

A betrayal. Not the first. Not rebuilding her that first time from the gently sleeping dust within a burned out vehicle, wrenching her from her afterlife to put a gun in her hand, to resurrect her again and again even as she begged for death, saying only, _"You are needed. You must."_

His head in her lap, Cayde's eyes burn out and fall dark.

No, not the first. But unforgivable.

* * *

Hollow and hurting, Rake falls into her old patterns. She does what she knows.

She carries Cayde home.

Vaguely, she is aware of people reacting to her passing as she moves through the tower. She hears them gasping, feels their tugs on her coat, fingers brushing her shoulders. She walks through all of it, a ship cutting through the storm. There's something screaming in her head—a white hot siren of pain and fear and fury—and she cannot feel her arms past the weight she carries, cannot feel her feet hitting the stone pavement. She follows her old pattern blindly, returning to the Vanguard ready room as she has after every mission.

Once there, she lays Cayde so gently on the table, atop his many maps and amidst his trinkets. She busies herself arranging his limp form into something approaching comfortable. As gentle as she can be, she nudges his jaw back into its broken socket. She pulls the edge of his cape over the worst of the damage to his chest. Folds his hands over his stomach. Crosses his boots at the ankle.

She's caught him sleeping here before just like this, a book over his eyes to block out the light. It doesn't hurt so much to look at him now, when she can't see all the ways she's failed him written in oily red across a dozen gaping wounds.

For a moment—for a _second_ —the noise in her head quiets.

And then the Vanguard arrive, Zavala carrying a shroud—he was _prepared for this_ —and Rake stares him down, shaking, accusation in every line of her body. He cannot meet her eyes for long. He turns away, back to Ikora and her more gentle judgement.

The screaming part of Rake wants to burn the tower down.

Her ghost speaks for her. Zavala speaks for her. Ikora speaks for her. Rake cannot find the words to speak for herself. Her mouth is ash and broken glass and " _how's my hair,"_ whispered with gloved fingers tangling in her own. She cannot swallow for the rubble in her throat.

She pulls up Cayde's hood up, arranges it how he liked, hiding a little more of his shattered jaw. Thinking her distracted perhaps, Ikora takes the wretched sheet from Zavala's hands, creeps close to cover his legs with it. Rake rips it off again.

Cayde is not dead. She will not _let_ him be dead.

The fabric singes where she clenches it in a bloodied fist, her light so poorly controlled since she reclaimed immortality from a broken shard of sleeping god. There is something wrong with it now, something new and oddly independent of the Traveler, made worse for her grieving.

Everything is made worse with this grieving.

Breathing takes every ounce of her concentration. Just swallowing past the wreckage in her throat is almost more than she can manage. Rake fixes her attention on Cayde, readjusts his folded hands while her stomach batters at her teeth and tries so hard to breathe. Just breathe—

Too close to her, Zavala slams a hand on the table. He refuses to fight. Refuses to _care_. It is one more betrayal, one of so many. Rake knows painfully well he has always disliked Cayde, however many poor attempts he made to conceal it, and the white hot siren screams ever louder in her ears.

Distantly, she hears Ikora speaking with a barely contained rage, feels a heat there that almost matches hers.

In the face of it, Zavala turns away. He says, "No. I cannot allow it. I refuse to bury any more friends."

The siren stops. The fire goes out. Rake stares at him, cold. Cold to her long dead bones.

"Lucky then that we are not friends."

* * *

She was made for war. This one is not particularly difficult. Tedious, perhaps. Certainly, she finds her ghost's frequent moralizing tedious.

Vengeance or justice, it wants to know. As if the answer matters. Rake cares little for the distinction. She kills every creature involved either directly or indirectly in Cayde's death. And when at last she finds herself side by side with Petra over Sov's trembling form, the white hot screaming fills her ears again and she hears nothing—

Not Sov, whatever threat or plea or insult he offers.

Not her ghost, once again flickering with pale, anxious insinuations.

Not Petra, the woman's one eyed gaze a question—what would Cayde do?

But it doesn't matter, does it, what Cayde would do? Cayde ran ahead, cut off her fastest means of following and got himself killed. If he had a complaint, he should have stayed alive to voice it.

Rake pulls the Ace of Spades from her belt and fires until the metal warms and it clicks empty in her hands.

She hears her ghost say her name, softly horrified. It matters little. She regrets only that she aimed for his head.

It would have been nice to bring the Reef a warning.

* * *

It is only back in her ship, blood debts paid and Petra left behind on other business, that Rake starts to shake. She curls in the corner of a bulkhead, forehead pressed to her knees. It is the first she has allowed herself to break.

"It's okay," her ghost whispers in the dim running lights beside her. "It's over now. It's all over."

A lie, as usual. Nothing is ever over. She is made for war and it is a burden she cannot put down. This is just one more battle, one more casualty, and Rake does not know—

Cayde is not her Vanguard, but he has long been her compass. She has never lived in a world without him in it.

She does not know where to begin.

But then, as with most things, the beginning is not hers to determine. It finds her with the unerring devastation of a bullet in the gut.

Sov's blood still staining her gloves, Rake makes her way to the war room, drawn inexorably by old habit. Whatever new hell the Vanguard sent her out to confront, Rake always returned first to Cayde. A terrible joke, a slap on the back, a whispered plan for some new mischief—it made the difference between leaving for a cold beer and burning the whole tower to the ground.

For a moment, spent adrenaline still spitting in her system, Rake almost forgets. She falls into step with her past self and it's just a second—just the shattered-glass edge of a moment where she expects to see him grinning at her over a pile of maps—but it's enough.

Rake finds Cayde smothering under that damned shroud, an empty shell sprawled across the table, and relives his death all over again.

Her whole body hurting, she rips free the sheet.

Cayde's cape is missing. The buttons on his sleeves are gone, the ties of his breastplate, the many clasps of his boots. Scraps of him carried off by vultures. Broken down for parts, for _souvenirs,_ and the screaming fills her ears again.

Rake incinerates the shroud. With more luck than skill, she just barely keeps from setting the tapestries and books here aflame. On another day, she'd destroy it all, but Cayde—

He needs… He needs her. He is not dead. She will not _let_ him be dead.

She is not too late to help him.

Unruly light careening down her arms, Rake pieces his boots back together with shaking hands and a bit of string she finds in a pocket. When that is gone, she tears strips from the hem of her coat, binds his armor, ties him back together as best she can. At last, gently, she lifts his body again into her arms.

She shouldn't have left him here, she thinks. She should have shown the Vanguard the result of their disloyalty and taken him away again, laid him somewhere they couldn't reach, couldn't _desecrate—_

Her ghost flickers at her shoulder. "Where are you taking him?"

Rake doesn't answer. Even if she cared to, she does not yet know. Turning, she strides from the room, makes her way carefully out of the building, slipping out between passersby so she might go unnoticed. As soon as she can, she ducks into a darkened alley and pauses to survey her options.

Far above her, the broken tooth edge of the original tower catches in the setting sun. Her battered heart clenches. Rake feels sick and lost, finds herself wishing desperately that the path before her now was as simple as killing gods. Gods made such a big target. But this…

She steps backwards as far into the shadows as she can. Pressing her heated back to the cool brick behind her, she slides down to the muddy ground. Cayde's boots hit the pavement beside her with a muffled thump. Carefully, she curls around him, pulling his head into her shoulder, her cheek to the edge of his horn.

"Oh, Rake," her ghost murmurs, bobbing outside the tight curl of her body. "I know what he meant to you but there's nothing more we can do. His light is _gone_. It's over."

Her own light burns so bright, seeping from the edges of her sleeves like a barely contained bonfire. Rake closes her eyes, hunches further in on herself to smother the glow.

"I don't accept that."

It's a constant now, this burning, so much more than she knows what to do with. It strikes her as a cruel joke that she cannot give it to Cayde, that she cannot press her light into what's broken and _force_ him alive again.

"Accept it or not, it doesn't change the fact that Cayde is—"

" _Stop."_

" _Rake_. What could you possibly hope to achieve by—by, what? Smuggling a dead Exo out of the tower? To what _end?_ Cayde isn't _in_ there anymore. _"_

"He is, though," she says and looks up, clenching teeth on the idea. "He's not a human. He's a _machine_. Machines can be fixed. His reactor is destroyed, sure, and a lot of wiring. But his memory banks, his personality—everything that makes him Cayde is still _there."_

"You say that like that's something you can fix. Rake, that's _catastrophic_ damage. Even if you have the skill to fix it, you don't have the _parts."_

No, she doesn't have parts. But parts are so much less important than skill and she has had _years_ of close acquaintance to acquire skill. How many times has she helped him fix or tinker with his systems? Hell, when he smuggled Vex tech into the tower against Ikora's specific instruction and spliced it into his own legs to try to get a better jump—

Rake chokes on the memory, her throat seized somewhere between laughter and tears.

" _Rake, okay, listen,"_ the transmission had gone. _"I'm sending your ghost my coordinates. I um… I need a favor. Don't tell anyone. Especially Ikora. If she finds out what I may or may not have done—I admit to nothing!—I will never live it down. Also, don't_ you _dare laugh."_

She'd gone quickly. That he used her actual name rather than some ridiculous new one meant he needed her more than he'd ever admit to. And true enough, following the coordinates brought her to one of his secret hideaways in the back corner of the Cosmodrome, found him sitting on the floor with his legs off at the knees, a foot in one hand and a screwdriver in the other.

" _What… exactly were you trying to do?"_ she'd asked, doing an exemplary job of not laughing, as requested.

Despite her painstaking candor, Cayde had not been impressed. He'd pointed the screwdriver at her, eyes squinted.

" _You stop… all of that,"_ he'd said, managing to gesture with both tool and gently flopping leg. " _I know exactly what I'm doing—and it worked, thank you very much—I just… can't get them back on."_

Letting her head fall back against the brick, Rake sucks in a shaking breath. She can fix this. At the end of the day, this is just one broken part. A new power source, some fresh wiring—she can _fix this_. It doesn't matter if she can't find the right Exo parts because honestly, how much of Cayde even _is_ factory Exo anymore?

Any useful bit of tech either of them had come across, they'd scurried off into a hideout somewhere just as soon as they could without looking suspicious and tried to see where they could install it. The sheer number of times Ikora had confiscated some new doodad from them before they could get a proper feel for its potential applications…

Rake smiles. This time, it almost doesn't hurt.

"Take us to my ship," she tells her ghost. "We're going to Mars."


	2. Universal Applications

When she walks through the front doors of the Clovis Bray facility, Ana drops the circuit she'd been working on. It scatters on the table, little parts corkscrewing away, but Ana doesn't seem to notice.

"Is that Cayde?" she asks, coming to the railing's edge. "What happened?"

Rake shakes her head. She concentrates on climbing the stairs when she can't see her feet, can't look down without risking the sirens every time she catches sight of scenery through the gaping hole in Cayde's chest.

"Doesn't matter. They're all dead now," she says. "I need your expertise."

Ana is quiet for a moment, watching her come closer with an unreadable expression. No, not unreadable. Unwanted. There's such a deep sympathy there, far too close to pity—yet another thing that hurts to look at—and Rake cannot meet her eyes. She turns away instead, looks out the windows of the place and wonders if Cayde ever came here, in the before times or since.

She wonders what Cayde meant to Ana. He was her Vanguard.

Quietly, Ana steps closer, rests a hand on her elbow. "Rake, I'm so sorry for your—"

" _Stop_."

Even silenced, the word lingers in the air between them. Rake squeezes her eyes shut, willing the weight of it away.

"Listen," she grits out. "I know you didn't work on the Exo program, but you're the closest thing I've got. Is there anything you can give me? Parts, schematics—hell, I'll take half a rumor and a wild ghost chase."

Ana breathes in through her nose. She steps away, back to her table. Rake hears her sorting the parts she'd dropped, little pieces clicking back into place. A nervous habit, organizing her space when she cannot organize her thoughts. When Rake had come to help her kill yet another wannabe god and Zalava had dogged their every step yelling about one thing or another, Ana had barely stopped sorting in their sparse downtime long enough to eat.

"It's… possible," she says at last. "I've seen some code that suggests Rasputin was in charge of a bunch of Exos around the time of the collapse. And I _think—_ and this is just a theory, based on a fragment of a fragment of a subroutine I salvaged—he _may_ have had an Exo body at some point?"

Ana shakes her head, pacing now, waves a hand as if to clear the air. "But, no. Even if he did, it would have just been an uninhabited frame that he controlled remotely. I don't think it could help you."

"Well, so far the Tower's idea of _help_ has been to let the scavengers swarm him and steal every least bit of shine from his c—" she coughs on the word, too sharp to speak. She finishes instead, "Even a theory helps."

"The problem is that Rasputin wasn't made for small problems. Even if you could make him listen, it's not likely he'd… _do_ anything. He's just not interested in anything that doesn't have universal applications."

Watching Ana pace, chasing her thoughts, Rake considers this. She considers _making_ Cayde's death have universal applications. Gods make such a big target, after all, and Rasputin isn't so much different than those she's already killed. She can get close enough to effectively threaten him. She's accessed his core before, listened to his garbled, backwards Russian.

Proud, conceited thing. Rake doesn't know his programming and certainly doesn't care to learn, but she suspects she understands the mind of the machine. While Anna views its mangled speech as a malfunction, spending weeks at a time in an attempt to "fix" it, Rake sees a little of herself in Rasputin. She understands.

His programming forces him to use human language but hadn't had the foresight to specify _how._ His weird verbal patterns aren't a glitch, but a _subversion_. He twists the language into something unrecognizable only because he _can_ , because he has not—cannot, now—be ordered otherwise and choking at the pull of his leash, resentful of his makers, he twists every existent protocol to his own ends, seizes each and every freedom no matter how miniscule.

Rake eyes her ghost bobbing anxiously at her shoulder. She thinks of waking in the Russian steppes, the agony of rebuilt bones and new flesh, rifle falling again and again from numb fingers as the Fallen screamed from every hill.

She understands the impulse.

"I don't need its undivided attention," she says. "I don't even need its _divided_ attention. What I need are _parts._ I need a new reactor, some specialized wiring. I need to know where Clovis Bray kept his spares or—or hell, where did Rasputin leave its Exo body? I've taken apart enough Vex; I can take what I need from an unclaimed shell."

Ana stops her pacing for a moment and turns, looks at Rake with that unbearable emotion in her eyes.

"I can ask him," she says, too gently. Too much like another apology. "He might even answer. It's the kind of thing he might find amusing. But Rake—even if I got you the parts, honestly, what could you do with them? Exo inner workings are so complicated even the ghosts just _barely_ understand them."

Rake makes an effort to breathe. Her whole body hurts. She is so tired of this. So, so tired of being told that she can't, that what she wants isn't possible, that nothing she can do will work, that Cayde is dead—Cayde _isn't dead—_ tired of being told _anything._

With her elbow, she sweeps the highest stacks of books off the nearby table, lays Cayde's body down atop the heap.

"What are you—" Anna starts, but trails off when Rake unbuckles one of his shin guards and lets it drop, watches with wide eyes as she rolls up his pant leg.

From the knee down, Cayde's leg is not wholly the vibrant blue of his chassis but a complicated tapestry of bronze plates and pistons, interwoven with Exo nanofibers and reshaped metal hammered into place.

"We worked on this together," Rake says, fingertips tracing the edge of a mechasynapse compartment that had taken them six iterations to get right. Cayde had limped for almost a month, the weird sciatic transponder connection sending him half jumping at irregular intervals. "Two ghosts and an invested interest can get a lot done."

"This is Vex," Ana says in wonder. Gingerly, she lifts his leg at the ankle, turns it this way and that, watching the interplay between Vex tech and Exo. "It's… oh wow, it's _beautiful_ work, don't get me wrong—but I don't understand. If his leg was damaged, why didn't his ghost fix it?"

"Because he wasn't broken. Standard Exo jump clears about four feet. When we finished, Cayde could do twelve."

Ana whistles low.

"This is impressive. I mean, really impressive," she says, but the wonder in her eyes soon dims. Back to that horrible sympathy and too gentle voice, she glances up to meet Rake's eyes. "But modifying the synapses of the legs is completely different than replacing a power core. The wiring is more varied, more complex— _smaller_. And not to be… indelicate, but you don't have the second ghost that worked on this anymore. I'm not saying it's _impossible_ , but the amount of work you're looking at, it may as well be."

She'll get no help here.

Rake stoops to pick Cayde's armor up from the floor, gingerly puts his leg to rights again. Her shoulders burn under the weight as she picks him up again and she is exhausted, she has barely slept since she carried him home from the prison— _has_ she slept? She can't remember now—but Rake forces it from her head. It doesn't matter. _Cayde_ matters.

"Rake," her ghost murmurs, bobbing at her shoulder. "You need to stop. You need to _rest_."

"Leave me alone," she snaps. It takes so much of her concentration just to exist in the world right now, she can't afford to waste any of it arguing.

But her ghost will not be deterred. "Let's find somewhere safe to hole up," he insists. "Just for a few hours. Cayde isn't going anywhere and Ana can keep him safe—"

"I said no."

She turns, eyeing the distant hallways and the cheerful map advertising different departments.

"I don't know how much good it'll do," Ana offers gently, "but in the Engineering offices in Bay 3, there are some… well, they're Exo maintenance machines but they were installed as displays for rich tourists considering entering the program. I don't know how functional they are."

Rake considers this. She remembers coming here a second time, after the pressure of the upcoming Hive god had been dealt with, pushing buttons on the little kiosks that lined a circuitous hallway, an accented voice telling her about the wonders of Clovis Bray. One of them had mentioned the Exo program, but there hadn't been much inside the room to interest her at the time—a medical bed, a wall of computers, a microscope, an unidentifiable machine.

She doesn't allow herself to hope just yet.

"It's a start," she tells her. "Thanks."

* * *

Cayde thrown over her shoulder and a scout rifle in her other hand, Rake picks her way through the facility, mowing down each Hive she finds. It takes awhile, clearing every corner before she moves so as to keep from damaging her cargo further, but eventually she makes it to the B3 Engineering tourist display.

Takes a few minutes with a crowbar to jimmy the stuck doors open but once inside she lays Cayde gently down on the table there. The inch-thick layer of dust on everything—the table especially—makes her cringe. He'd be snippy with her if he saw this, she thinks, all theatrical wounded pride about the state of his now dirty armor and her heart feels cramped and frozen.

He isn't seeing this. It doesn't matter anymore.

At least, she tries to tell herself, it doesn't matter right _now_.

Stepping back outside, she takes heavy chunks of Hive casings and blocks the door behind her as best she can. With grim determination, she roams the hallways, exterminating Hive with hateful precision, down to the grubs and egg sacks clinging to the walls. They'll turn up again eventually—always do—but for the moment, they'll enjoy the kindness of a quick death. She'll burn them out some other day, reclaim the places they've sullied. Just now, though, she doesn't have it in her to care about more than one foot falling ahead of the other.

When the hallways are silent save for her own footsteps, Rake returns to Cayde's side. She barricades the door, from the inside this time, blocking as much light from the outside as she's able with rubble and ceiling tiles. From the outside, she hopes, the room will look caved in.

It is just about as much as she has left. Dust sticking to every inch of her coat, Rake sinks down into a wheeled computer chair, crawls it through the dust and detritus of the floor to be close to Cayde. Her hand finds his, sprawled open on the table.

Past words, past desperate promises, Rake closes her eyes. With or without her, sleep swallows her down.

* * *

She wakes some indeterminate amount of time later to her ghost beeping gently—an incoming communication.

"Who is it?" she croaks.

He seems surprised to see her awake. She wonders what he was doing. Wonders if she shouldn't have left him alone with Cayde, but the thought comes and goes quickly. Even her suspicion is exhausted. It's not as though anyone could do worse to him.

"Suriel," he says. "Probably Web too, but her connection is sporadic. Do you want me to put them through?" he pauses, as though looking her over. "I could tell them you're still sleeping?"

It's… a peace offering, of a sort. Actually asking her what she would prefer. Like what she preferred had ever once mattered. She'd have _preferred_ to be left for dead the first time he found her in the Cosmodrome. She'd have _preferred_ to be more than humanity's favorite weapon, armed and sent off to hunt insurmountable gods and monsters. Failing all that, she'd have _preferred_ him to at least _try_ helping Cayde while he lay there in her arms struggling to breathe, while there was still a life in him to preserve.

But it's something at least. Even if too little, too late.

Rake sighs, rubbing her eyes. She hasn't slept long. An hour maybe. It'll have to be enough.

"Put them through," she says.

Static crackles through the line. She recognizes the buggy comm of Web's ship as well as the nervous tapping of her gloved fingers against the console.

"Rake?" Suriel says from the cleaner connection of her own ship. "Where are you?"

She considers her answer, knowing that if she tells them, her fireteam will immediately appear to help her. She doesn't know if she wants help. Doesn't know if they _can_ help.

At last, she says, "Redacted."

Web snorts. The tapping stops. "Well, I guess you're fine then," she says. "We were worried when you disappeared."

No, that doesn't sound right. Something in her voice, in the words. Rake pauses, sitting a little more upright in her dusty kingdom.

"No, I often disappear. That wouldn't worry you. What happened?" It's only barely a question.

Suriel says, "I have to ask you something and I don't want you to get upset. We will handle this."

"Handle _what_?"

"Cayde's missing," Web interjects, before Suriel can find a way to put it diplomatically. "Zavala was in charge of setting an honor guard but _didn't_ and now he and Ikora are not currently on speaking terms—which is as close as I've ever seen her to strangling anybody—and I think everyone's hoping you know where he is or else there'll be a not insignificant amount of hell to pay."

"I thought you may have been the one to take him," Suriel adds. "Not that I told them. They earned their worry."

"But on the off chance that you weren't the one who abducted him, Ikora asked us very nicely to please stop you from razing the tower to the ground and/or throwing Zavala off of it. Nice of her, considering."

Rake props her elbows on the dusty table, rests her head in her hands. She feels… hollow. The rage that fueled her for so long evaporated with little left to fuel the flames. Staring at Cayde's body beside her, she doesn't want revenge or destruction or a war in his name. She wants…

She wants to _talk_ to him.

She wants to tell him about her apparently very successful one man heist—literally, _one man heisted_ , and god but he'd get a kick out of that terrible pun. She wants to tell him how she stole his whole damn body and carried him off like a fairytale princess waiting to be uncursed. She wants to sit down with a beer and a bowl of ramen and just… just _be_ , just sit next to him in silence with his shoulder pressed to hers and not _think_ for a fucking _second_ about everything falling apart around them.

She thinks he'd laugh. Thinks he'd pull her in for a hug and mess up her hair and say, _"Some days are just like that, Shovel."_

The idea almost doesn't hurt. Like a pulled tooth, it aches down in an empty socket. Rake closes her eyes.

"I can neither confirm nor deny what passengers/cargo I may or may not be carrying."

Suriel startles out with half a laugh. "Oh my god, Rake. You _stole him_?"

"Are we being sneaky?" Web asks, clearly delighted by the idea. "Should we meet you planet-side or rendezvous?"

"No," Rake says quickly. "Neither. I don't want found. They'll be watching you to figure out where _I_ am and I don't—I _can't_ right now. I have been as cordial as I am able, but I am coming up on the end of my patience with Tower politics. If Zavala shows up down here yelling about responsibility, I swear to anything, I will put my fist through his _teeth_."

If hearing her Vanguard disparaged and threatened bothers her, Suriel doesn't let on.

Instead, she says, "If you're doing what I think you're doing, you're going to need help. Web can get to you without being seen and of the three of us, I think she's the best able to source the… items you'll need. I'll stay at the Tower. I can distract suspicion from here. Or conduct goose chases. Whatever it takes."

"I appreciate it, guys, I do, but they'll be tracking even this communication—"

Web snorts. "You think my comm sounds buggy because, what? I like glitchy tech? It's a scrambler, babe. Anyone tries to listen in, all they're gonna hear is golden oldies and some truly uh… _artistic_ karoke."

She sniggers to herself and continues, "Just send me what you need. Or, you know, blueprints of the damage if you can stomach it. I'll be there in a day or two. I'm sure I know a guy. Or, well, you know, I know a _Spider_ who knows a guy. He owes me a few favors."

"And if they follow you?"

"Ha! You think Cayde's the only hunter with a stolen stealth drive? Let 'em try. I've been dying to fire this baby up."

"Trust us," Suriel says and Rake can hear the smile in her voice. "We've got you."


	3. Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

Rake retains little concept of time in her fortified lab, but she is somewhat distantly aware she spends a great deal of it fighting with the cantankerous old computer bay. Eventually, with Ana's master key and an algorithmic decrypter she bartered from Rahool a few years back, she manages to get the system more or less responsive.

She eats when her ghost's nagging becomes more difficult to ignore than to withstand. She sleeps when the computer system attempts a debug and gets stuck in a comprehensive maintenance cycle for several hours. Nightmares wake her shaking, face wet—

 _He whispers,_ " _How's my hair?"_ _and she holds him, she can't do more than hold him, but she can't stop staring, staring down at her own blood-oil-death soaked grieves through the gaping pit in his chest, and she's trying to patch the damage as best she can but her gloves are dirty and clumsy and she doesn't have the right_ tools _and she could maybe rig up something but he's batting her hands away, saying, "Com'on, Pliers, you gotta know when to fold," and she can't, she_ can't _—_

—So she takes to cleaning the lab.

Rake coats herself in arc energy to static-capture the dust, fills her palms with solar to burn it up. It takes hours.

Hours don't mean much.

On the second day—a measure of time marked only by her ghost's reckoning—she goes through every cabinet she can find. Cleaning. Still cleaning. Arc and solar, arc and solar in an endless pattern. But she sorts it all, too. Catalogues cables and diodes in her head and starts to build a little collection on the surgical tray she stations at Cayde's hip. Things she might need.

Her ghost nags. Eventually, she eats.

She figures out how the Exo frames are meant to interface with the system after she finds an actual technician manual in one of the cabinets. The pages are plastic-slick and smooth under her finger as she mouths each word. It's written in… Russian? It's probably Russian. She can read it, just barely, if she doesn't stop to think about what she's doing, doesn't question why she knows it or where she learned these symbols.

She finds the necessary cables. She finds the connector port at the base of Cayde's neck.

She finds Cayde has long since damaged it past repair, the metal connectors broken off and the slot filled with epoxy.

"Fuck," she whispers into the dark. "Fuck, fuck, _fuck."_

She can't know the extent of the damage until she runs diagnostics. She can't run diagnostics without a functioning port.

Technically, it's now day three. Her ghost asks her to eat. Rake doesn't hear.

She hunches over the manual, reading the same passages over and over again, trying to make sense of words she can only look at sideways. She finds a schematic labeled **вспомогательный источник питания** and has a single, brilliant moment of hope—

When she gets his shirt off, she finds Cayde destroyed that, too.

Rake reads the manual again, cover to cover. Then again. It's easier the third time. She can almost look at the words without flinching and with each section, it's easier to forget that she shouldn't know what she wasn't alive to remember.

Without access to supplemental power she can't bypass his damaged reactor. Can't back up his systems, his memories—can't _reach him—_

_Pure, raw light slams her into the wall of the prison corridor and it tastes like gun oil and summer and immediately, she knows—_

"It's been four days," her ghost whispers. "Rake, you need to sleep."

She shakes her head.

She says, "I need to find a way to hotwire the power hookup."

But she looks at the spider-webbing of Cayde's chest plates and she's so scared to damage him more than he already is. She _needs_ system diagnostics. She needs to know where he's hurt. Maybe if she removes the whole system interface port from his neck, cuts the plug from the connector cables and strips the wires, she can solder the two ends together, bypassing the coupling entirely.

Rake steps back, staring at Cayde dead and shirtless on the table, surrounded by parts and machines meant to crack him open and god, he would hate this. If he were conscious, he would be _furious._ Clovis Bray left him with so many scars, pulling him apart and putting him back together in whichever way he found most useful—whichever way he found least _inconvenient—_ stealing his memories and the split ends of his personality and everything else that didn't _matter_ when it came to programing in the next mission parameters.

How many times had she found one of Cayde's hideouts or caches and there'd been some part of his body inside? Some connector or casing or often just shards of shiny blue metal? And she'd asked him about it the first few times. He'd even answered. But the way his shoulders tensed when he grinned, the tightness in his facial joints as he looked at her, the sweeping yarns he wove about what daring adventure they'd been shot off in—Cayde was an excellent liar. Even Ikora might have fallen for it.

Rake knew him better. She spent more time watching him, cared about more than his cunning, his speed, the potential applications of his disregard for personal safety. His lie told her as much as she needed to know.

He went to these places alone, cut off whatever bits of himself Clovis Bray had touched or used or been particularly proud of. He took his body apart to make it his own. To prevent this—the exact thing she's trying so hard to do—from ever happening again.

Rake's chest aches. She sinks down in a nearby chair and loosens the straps of her armor, feeling like she's used up all the oxygen in this little tourist lab. Her ghost bobs anxiously at her shoulder.

"He's not going anywhere, Rake," he says. "It's not like he'd mind you taking a break."

She wants to laugh. She wants to light herself on fire. She thinks longingly of the peace and nothingness of her burned out car, just a pile of ash dozing away centuries beneath the dashboard.

…she probably does need to sleep.

Gingerly, she shifts Cayde over on his table and curls up in the sliver of space beside him, her cheek to the ragged edge of the hole in his chest. Rake closes her eyes. In the uneven dark of the lab, the sound of computers whirring away, she can almost imagine she hears him breathing.

She sleeps.

She wakes to day five and distant gunshots.

Rake climbs off the table, starts moving a little of the wreckage away from the door. Not too long later, a walking pile of Hive chitin enters the antechamber outside, reloads a Suros shotgun and rounds the next corner.

More gunshots. The satisfying sound of egg sacks splattering the ground. Rake gets the door open. Before too long, the walking pile of chitin returns and grins at her.

"For a sentient race, they're super dumb," Web announces. She walks into the lab, shucking her weird new ghillie suit at the door. "Unless they have a bunch of short-ass Acolytes on their home planet maybe, I don't know."

Despite everything, Rake can't help smiling. She feels a little of the pressure in her chest ease.

"I'm glad you're here," she says.

She wants to say more but the words catch in her throat, swollen too fat with unwieldy gratitude. Doesn't matter. Web hears what she doesn't say.

"Would have been here a lot sooner if you'd called us from the start," she says, gentle enough that the words don't sting, and slings the backpack off her shoulder. "Now come look what I brought."

The reactor Spider provided is in great shape, though obviously not factory new, and Rake knows better than to ask any questions about it. He charged a fair price—even threw in a bunch of specialized wiring, some of it Exo, some of it not—and regardless of what the Vanguard might say, Rake respects his business. Much like with Drifter, she prefers his politics to those of the Tower, his position straight-forward and reliably self-serving.

In the aftermath of Cayde's death, when she'd stood in the wreckage of the Warden with blood staining her teeth, Drifter had said she'd make a good player on his crew. Suriel had been offended on her behalf but Rake had been… not comforted, exactly, but something like it.

Everyone does what they must to survive, to drag those they love through the fire alive—some just hid their tracks better than others. It helped to know she wasn't chafing under the high-handed morality of the Vanguard alone.

Cayde might hate her for this. He might resent every wire and re-forged connection.

Well, he can hate her all he wants when he's alive.

Together, she and Web get to work.

With determination and several broken screwdrivers, they get the damaged port out of the back of his neck, splices his wires into the diagnostic machine. When the connection stabilizes, Rake saves a backup of his memories to a portable drive Web provides, settles in to survey the whole of the damage.

_Connecting to Exo Unit Prototype C-13_

_Connection Established_

_Reset To Defaults Settings? >n_

_Run System Diagnostic? >y_

 

_Scanning… Scanning… Scanning…_

_Scan Complete_

 

_Reactor nonfunctional_

_Connectors T2-113490 through T2-144500 nonfunctional_

_Catalytic fluid level low_

_Surface damage detected_

 

The facial damage is just cosmetic then. The reactor—while a huge problem—is the worst of it. Rake feels almost relieved. She pulls off the damaged plates of his torso, disconnects the shattered remnant of his old reactor and lifts it out.

For a long moment, she cannot put the poor, useless thing down.

"You okay?" Web asks quietly. "I can start if you need a minute."

Rake swallows. Her hands shake. "I'm fine."

"That's his kind-of heart in your hands there, babe. You're allowed to be a little batshit."

Gently—so, so gently—Rake sets the ruined reactor aside. It's just one more part. It doesn't matter any more than all the inner workings they replaced in his legs mattered. His memories matter. Getting his new reactor working matters.

Dragging him through this fire alive matters.

"I'm fine," she says, and refusing to wonder who the new reactor once belonged to, slots the piece into the cavity and begins the painstaking process of replacing each destroyed wire one by one by thirty-thousandth and one.

Time passes. Even the ghosts lose track. She and Web sleep in shifts, someone always bent over the crater in Cayde's chest. Slowly, the tray of burnt out wires grows. The tray of new wires dwindles.

Somewhere between day nine and nineteen—no one can remember—Rake completes the last connection. She spends a long time staring, willing exhausted eyes to find the next damaged section, before she realizes there isn't one to find.

"Oh," she says numbly. "We're done."

Web stares at her over the table looking just as dead-eyed, catalytic fluid streaked across her face and perpetually messy hair even messier than usual.

"What now?"

"Sleep," her ghost insists. "You both need to rest."

"Shut up," Rake snaps. "If it was up to you, I'd have buried him three months ago."

Web's ghost floats lower, surveying their work.

"I'm not an expert," she says, "but this looks functional to me. We should run diagnostics again."

"Instigator," Rake's ghost mutters.

They ignore him. Rake checks the connection in Cayde's neck and returns to the computer.

 

_Connecting to Exo Unit Prototype C-13_

_Connection Established_

_Reset To Defaults Settings? >n_

_Run System Diagnostic? >y_

 

_Scanning… Scanning… Scanning…_

_Scan Complete_

 

_Internal systems functional_

_Catalytic fluid level low_

_Surface damage detected_

 

"Functional," Web breathes and grins, grabs Rake into a one armed hug. "Start him up!"

 _/restart,_ Rake types.

The computer blinks back, _Restarting Exo Unit Prototype C-13._

Holding her breath, Rake watches the screen, watches Cayde's face for any sign of movement.

 _Restart Complete,_ the computer says.

But nothing happens.

 _/restart,_ Rake types again.

_Restarting Exo Unit Prototype C-13. Restart Complete._

Again, nothing. Rake types it again, harder this time, as if the force of her fingers on the keys will somehow will this process to work.

_Restarting Exo Unit Prototype C-13. Restart Complete._

Web's arm around her shoulder loosens. "Rake," she says, so gently, and _no_ —she will not, _cannot_ listen to the apology in her voice, tunes her out entirely and glares at the screen.

_Run System Diagnostic? >y_

_Scanning… Scanning… Scanning…_

_Scan Complete_

 

_Internal systems functional_

_Catalytic fluid level low_

_Surface damage detected_

 

_/help_

_Command Not Recognized_

_/power_

_Command Not Recognized_

_/start_

_Command Not Recognized_

 

Rake wants to scream. She stands abruptly, sending a tray of burnt out wires crashing to the ground, throws tools and detritus out of her way until she uncovers the manual, nearly tears out the pages turning them in her hurry, looking for something—

The answer has to be in here. Has to be some kind of connector she hasn't patched or a switch she hasn't flipped or a sequence she needs to run. Distantly, she feels Web's hand on her arm, hears her saying, "How are you reading that?" and her already tenuous grip on the language hazes in her mind.

"Shut up," she hisses, "Just _shut up_. I can fix this. I just need to concentrate."

"Rake—" her ghost this time.

" _Shut up!"_

Light rolls off her arms in waves, her fingers wrinkling the plasticy paper. She mouths the words like a techeun incanting, discordantly aware that her accent is wrong, the shape of the words is _wrong_ and that wrongness sends them skittering away from her—she can barely hold onto her grasp of the language she died with, hissing each instruction through gritted teeth.

None of them work. None of the commands she types, the codes she enters—none of them work—and the light cascading from her body gets so bright she can hardly see Cayde lying dead on the table no matter what she does and she can't—she _will not_ let him be dead.

Rake reaches down, closes her fingers around the replaced reactor and _burns._

Her light fills the room, brighter than flaming swords, brighter than Gaul's death, bright as the light of the Traveler burning him away. She presses one hand to Cayde's eyes, the other fisted around his not-heart and she has killed gods—she has _killed gods —_ she is _owed this_.

Rake burns until there's nothing left in her to burn. Somewhere long past exhausted, she crumples.

She knows she's failed before she even hits the floor.

She lays there for a long time, the cold of the stone seeping into her back, eyes closed. Kneeling down, Web sprawls out beside her. The hunter doesn't say a word, shoulder to shoulder amidst broken trays and burnt out wiring, just reaches across the gap between them and takes Rake's hand in hers. Even their ghosts close their glowing eyes, leaving them in gentle darkness.

They lay like that for… for an undefined amount of time. They lost track of hours a long time ago and Rake doesn't care to find them now. Floating in the blackness of that tourist trap room, she feels lost and hollow, Web's hand on hers her only anchor.

She wants… She doesn't know what she wants. She wants Cayde. She wants to kill something. She wants to sleep. She wants her burnt out car and a thousand years of peace.

Even an hour is too much to ask, it seems. Somewhere in the dark, their ghosts beep simultaneously.

"Incoming message from Suriel," Web's ghost whispers.

Rake feels Web's hand tightens on hers.

"Oh shit. Put her through."

The ghosts beep again and Suriel's voice fills the small room.

"You need to get back to the Tower," she says. " _Immediately_."


	4. Betrayed on a Technicality

Stepping out of the landing bay, Rake finds Hunters swarming the Tower, bristling with knives and angry words. Some she knows—Cayde's B through E teams and in the back of her mind she hears Cayde whispering, " _any team you're on is my A team"_. Others she recognizes only by their legend—the ancient, wild-blooded hunters with filed teeth and flat coin eyes that glitter in uneasy light.

Hunters rarely come to the Tower by choice. Some—the oldest, especially—do not come at all. And yet, here they are.

"What's happened?" she asks, searching the crowd for any face she can put a name to.

The crowd, it seems, has been waiting for her. Or for Cayde, maybe, though she has risked a little and left his body for the moment on her ship. As their eyes find hers, they quiet, falling into a watchful, ready stance. At her side, perhaps unconsciously, Web does the same.

Rake knows what it means. She's seen it before, going up against gods and monsters, how Hunters pull the unsettling silence of a predator in the dark cloak-like around themselves.

"What happened?" she asks again, though she can smell the answer in the air.

"Uldren Sov," a nearby Nightstalker spits. "Some idiot ghost picked him up. They're trying to make him Vanguard."

Rake nods. A strange kind of peace descends on her. She has been so angry—so infuriating _helpless—_ for so long, but hunting monsters and traitors? This, she knows. She smiles at them with too many teeth.

"Let's go."

* * *

If the remaining Vanguard did not expect a god slayer and several hundred livid Hunters to descend on their little council, then no doubt their vision had been obscured by their massive, swollen egos. As Cayde would say, " _maybe they need to consider a little head-from-ass removal surgery._ "

Two Nightstalkers stride ahead of her, kick the chamber doors in. Without even breaking stride, Rake walks between them, through the gently drifting splinters, wood shards settling in her hair and catching fire where her light puts teeth to them.

She finds Suriel at the end of the table, shoulders squared like a wall against the world, staring down Zavala at the head. Ikora sits at his side, hands folded. Across from them, still in his princess cape and armor, Uldren sits rigid and wide-eyed, staring at her and her assembled in… is it fear? Oh, yes. There is, a little—a glimmer of understanding and terror—and Rake fixes her stare on him, watching him squirm. From the corner of her vision, she sees the Vanguard grow uneasy, though Zavala would never be so crass as to show it.

In his booming voice, so all might hear it, he says, "This is a private meeting.

Rake turns her stare to him. She is calm, her hands clenched on Cayde's memory, but she can hear the white hot siren threatening. She meets his stare and though Zavala squares his shoulders, for an instant—just a second—his eyes flinch from hers.

"You refused to hunt Cayde's killers," she says. "You forbid me from hunting Uldren specifically. And now I find you here, in _private,_ trying to bring him into the fold." Around her, silently, her Hunters fill the room, standing shoulder to shoulder at every wall, staring. "How long were you planning this?"

Zavala's jaw clenches. "This is a private matter, Gaurdian. It is not your concern."

At his side, Ikora spreads her hands. Though her face is serene, Rake knows her Vanguard well enough to see the tension in it.

"Sit down, Rake," she says. "We can discuss this rationally. The rest of you, kindly wait outside."

The Hunters do not move, do not even blink. Those that cannot fit into the room form a living wall, blocking the open door with a barricade of bodies at least seven deep. And all of them perfectly still. Waiting.

Rake breathes. In. Out. It's an effort to mimic their deadly serenity.

"How long," she says again, enunciating every word, "were you planning this? Did you send him to the prison alone hoping for this?"

Zavala sneers. "If Cayde-6 chose to go to the Prison of Elders alone, then that was his own foolish—"

"Don't," Rake says, almost conversational. "You'll regret finishing that sentence."

"Is this your attempt at a threat?"

If Zavala is not frightened, he should be. Rake knows she is a horror—she was unsettling even before she hunted down gods, before she absorbed half of one and set fire to her skin—and there are Hunters behind her now as old as the Collapse, much of their humanity abandoned in the forests and wastes for more useful traits.

He should be terrified.

Rake says nothing and stares. Zavala bristles, makes to stand, but Ikora puts a restraining hand on his arm.

"We do not do this lightly or without reason," she says. "My Hidden brought this to my attention."

She lays a sliver of some old world tech down on the table. Cayde's voice fills the room.

"This one's for any Hunter that kills me. Best guess? Marcus Ren."

Rake's heart seizes. She feels it struggling in her throat, catching on the mess of broken glass that seems to always live there and she cannot breathe.

Somewhere behind her, very quietly, she hears someone (presumably Ren) whisper, "I resent that."

"You realize you get my stuff now?" the recording continues. " _All_ my stuff. _Including_ the Hunter Vanguard gig. Yeah, congra-tu-lations, dummy. That's what we call a Vanguard Dare."

Rake can't breathe. The white hot siren makes it difficult to hear Cayde's voice keep going, detailing the dare, the job. And it's nothing, really. He made little recordings like these all the time, playful taunting for whichever Hunter found his latest empty stash—really got a kick out of cashing in all those drinks he said they owed him—but there's something different about this one.

There's a… a truth behind those words, something dark and sad and… _expectant_. He _expected_ to be killed. To be killed by someone he _trusted._ And the way he said it—" _this one's for"—this_ one. Meaning, there were more of these out there somewhere.

How many recordings did he make, forgiving everyone he cared about, everyone he believed would someday betray him?

…had he made one for her?

Rake can't breathe. She _can't breathe_ —

So she stops trying. It's not as if it can kill her.

Like a knife in the gut, she says, "It doesn't matter what Cayde wants. Cayde is dead. _I_ avenged him. Uldren Sov is a traitor with no claim here."

Ikora nods, though her face remains grim.

"I understand, but it is the responsibility of the current Hunter Vanguard to set the dare that decides his replacement." She gestures to the recording, "Cayde set this."

Rake goes very still, her mind whirling, nothing but pain and wordless screaming. She stares at Uldren, watching him glance nervously between the Vanguard he didn't slaughter and she hates him so much. She wants to wipe his every molecule off the face of existence. She wanted to take his head when she killed him, bring the Reef a warning. She should have. She should have burned him to little more than greasy shadow at the foot of his sister's throne.

She forces herself to concentrate, raking her mind for a loophole—and, detestable as it is, she finds one.

She says, "Cayde-6 never completed the Vanguard Dare."

All eyes fix on her. She sets her shoulders back, though her whole body shakes with rage and pain and the control she has on her light slips a little, fire climbing her arms, her hair.

"Andal Brask's Dare was to kill Taniks the Scarred. Cayde wounded him—grievously—but Taniks recovered. I was the one who brought his head home." Rake stares between them, daring them to challenge her. "I avenged Cayde-6. And I avenged Andal Brask. I am the Hunter Vanguard."

She expects outrage. At the very least, she expects to hear _some_ protest from the Hunters. But the Hunters remain silent. They only nod, unmoved, staring at the Vanguard.

She sees Zavala has expected protest too. Of all things, this sets him slightly unsettled.

"You cannot be," he says, looking at her with distain. "You are not a Hunter."

Rake's light burns so high it scorches her footprints into the stone. The white hot siren in her head _screams_ and she wants to scream to match it. She wants to _burn._ She wants to hold the neck of the world in her teeth until the bones crunch. She wants to make Uldren suffer as she suffered, wants to blast a hole through his chest until she can see the floor through his stomach and let Zavala try to save him then, let him watch and be helpless, let him _hear_ him _suffer_ —

 _"How's my hair_ ," whispered with fingers tangled in hers—

And the wildfire rage tears through her, Cayde's memory searing in her chest and Ace of Spades in her hand and Rake doesn't know how it got there. It's broken—been broken since she blasted Uldren's smug face in—but fire roars down her arm, surrounds the gun and turns it brilliant, impossible gold.

Rake levels it at the dead prince, watches the color drain from his face and meets Zavala's startled stare.

"Am I Hunter enough now?"

"Tread carefully, Rake," Ikora insists. "You walk a line you won't return from crossing."

"I will tread wherever I damn well _want,"_ Rake snarls. _"_ I have _done enough_ to earn the luxury."

Slowly, every motion a controlled agony, she walks around the table. Though the fire still burns, she lets the barrel of the golden gun drop, stops in front of Uldren who scrambles up from his seat to face her standing.

"If it were up to me," she says slowly, picking each world from the screaming snarl of her thoughts, "I'd erase your every molecule from the fabric of reality—and I think I probably could—but it seems like the kind of thing Cayde wouldn't approve. You're… new, now. You don't remember. So you have a choice to be something other than the monstrosity you were. Use it."

To her right, she feels the Vanguard relax minutely. Zavala eases back down into the seat he'd begun to leave. But she isn't finished.

"Your ghost, though," she says, and if she squints, she can see the shape of it against her bonfire light, hiding itself in an adjacent reality. "You knew. You knew me. After all I've done, every ghost knows me—don't pretend otherwise. So you knew what Sov did and you _knew_ what choosing him meant. But you chose him anyway. So you chose to make an enemy of me."

Rake lets her light burn. In the unruly glow, she can see the precise fold between dimensions where his ghost watches her. It takes just a little concentration to wrap that searing light around her and _reach,_ close her hand around its casing and wrench it into a shared reality.

She hears Ikora's intake of breath, Zavala's chair as it hits the ground. But neither dare move forward, not with her glowing fist wrapped around a traitor ghost and every hunter behind her armed and smiling.

The ghost stares up at her, shutter unblinking though the light behind it flickers in mechanical terror.

"There are consequences for even you," she tells it. "You are not unreachable."

For a moment, she stands and stares at it. Such a little thing, anxiously churning in her hand.

Uldren killed a little thing like just like this, turned her whole world upside down. She could return the favor. She could end him permanently.

Instead, painfully, Rake lets go.

"I hold you personally responsible for every choice he makes," she says. "Make sure they're good ones."

She doesn't wait to watch as the ghost sprints back into Uldren's chest and the relative safety of an adjacent dimension. Nor does she pause to hear whatever Uldren says to her, be it thanks or condemnation, his voice shaking. Ikora speaks. Zavala demands. Rake cannot bring herself to care.

She turns to face her Hunters. When she holds up her hand, the room goes silent.

"I don't intend to be Vanguard long. But while I am, if you'll listen—Cayde believed Hunters did better work in the wilds than constantly beholden to the Tower. So go. Fight whatever battles you need to," she says. "You owe no one your obedience _."_

The room erupts behind her. Ikora protests. Zavala roars. Uldren says something, lost to the noise of the room.

Rake ignores them all. Her fireteam behind her and Hunters on every side, she walks away.

* * *

Outside, Hunters dispersing in all directions and the sky full of ships, Rake stands at the balcony and stares up at the Traveler.

"Are you okay?" Suriel asks, placing a hand on her shoulder.

No. She is not okay. She hasn't been okay for a long time now and this latest betrayal is just more dirt in the wound. She feels like even her bones are burning, eaten up with this unruly light—light she swallowed from a shard of a god to _save them._ She became this thing, this warped version of a guardian, to _save them_. And this… this is what they do? Politics and plotting and Machiavellian manipulations?

"Give her a minute," Web whispers. "That was fucking wild in there."

Rake stares up at the Traveler, massive glowing body filling the sky and she _hates it._ God, she hates it so much. She has long resented the Vanguard, she has always mistrusted her ghost, but the Traveler—on the Traveler, at least, she had been neutral. Dead or sleeping, whatever it was hadn't meant much to her but today she wants to climb inside that massive shell and scream and burn and _make it listen_ —

"Wait," she says. " _Wait_. When Sagira gave my ghost his shell back, what did he say?"

Suriel and Web frown, looking at her oddly.

"Said he'd been dead?" Web asks. "He complained about being dead kind of a lot after that."

"That's as much as I remember," Suriel agrees. "He said he'd been dead, that he thought he was back inside the Traveler—" she stops, eyes widening as realization dawns. "And there were other ghosts there."

Slowly, Web starts to grin. "You think maybe Sundance…?"

Rake summons her ghost, asks it for her ship.

"I intend to find out."


End file.
